“Let’s end youth homelessness by the year 2000.”

He decided to do something about it.

Twenty-eight years later, what started with 34 people sleeping out for one night has raised more than **£14.6 million** for Action for Children.

Ken joined me on The Third Half to tell the story of Boycott Your Bed, the people it has helped, why he still does it, and why one uncomfortable night can make a very real difference.

Full transparency: I’m on the Glasgow organising committee, so yes, I’m selling this one. Shamelessly.

Here’s a little taste of our conversation.

Full episode coming soon.

2nd October 2026 - London-Leeds-Manchester-Glasgow.

Here’s how to get involved: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/support-us/boycott-your-bed/

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I’d been following her from afar for a while, even before Street Soccer Scotland. She helped lead fundraising at the Prince & Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, part of the team that raised £21 million to build the new hospice, and it was obvious even then that this wasn’t just a job for her. It’s who she is. Plenty of people talk about giving back as though it’s another line for the CV. Heather just gets on and does it, and she doesn’t seem to know how to do anything by halves: she dances competitively, she’s completed an Ironman, and she’s built an entire career around helping charities change lives rather than simply supporting them from a distance.

I came away from the conversation properly in awe of her energy, her humility, and her commitment to making a difference.

Here’s a short trailer. The full conversation lands soon.

People. Planet. Progress.

#ThirdHalf #Reinvention #Purpose #Community

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“Fancy coming along?”

That’s the easy bit. It’s everything after it that’s given me weeks of grief, because every time I try to explain what “it” actually is, I hear the same voice in my head: “Oh really? Sorry, I’m washing my hair.”

Not because I don’t want people to come. Quite the opposite. It’s because I know exactly what those words can sound like: another networking event, another room full of people introducing themselves with their job title before they’ve told you anything that matters, another evening where everyone claims they’re just there to meet interesting people while quietly working out who might become a client.

If that’s what this is, I’ve completely misunderstood what The Third Half is trying to do.

We’ve spent more time thinking about this than almost anything else we’ve done this year: how do you bring interesting people together without creating one of those events? Somewhere along the way we’ve managed to commercialise nearly every human interaction going. Networking breakfasts, networking coffees, networking walks, networking runs, networking drinks, and now, God help us, networking padel, because apparently even hitting a small yellow ball with your regional sales director needed a value proposition. The implication is always the same: every conversation has to earn its keep, every handshake needs an ROI, every coffee should lead somewhere.

That leaves me cold. I’d rather finish the game, have a pint afterwards, and find out what actually makes someone tick. Not what they do. Who they are.

There’s an irony in all this that isn’t lost on me. Some of the most important people in my life arrived through what you’d technically have to call networking. Clients became collaborators, collaborators became friends, ideas became businesses, conversations changed careers. But none of it started because either of us turned up intending to network. It started because we had a conversation worth having.

Here’s another confession: I’m not organising this because I need more friends. I’m lucky, I already have more good friends than I deserve. What I want is for good people to find each other. For someone wrestling with an idea to meet someone who’s wrestled with it before. For an entrepreneur to meet an artist, a teacher to meet a technologist, a campaigner to discover they’re not shouting into the void. For someone to leave thinking they hadn’t looked at it like that before.

That’s why we’re having an anniversary gathering. There’ll be live music, good cheese, and a glass of something if that’s your thing. And I hope there’ll be the sort of conversations that remind us why getting people together still matters. No speed networking, no awkward icebreakers, no pressure to work the room. Just a bunch of curious, decent people spending a couple of hours together.

If you leave with a new client, great. But if you leave having discovered a brilliant charity, a new band, a fresh perspective, or simply a bit more faith in people, I’d call that a far better return on your evening.

So here’s the actual invitation. Third Half Live is happening on 25 August, at The Flēot, just off Fleet Street. It’s a green skills hub, which felt right for what we’re trying to do. We’ll have around fifty people there. The Ferm are involved somehow, there may be samples, there may even be doggy bags, honestly the whole thing is organic and still evolving as I write this. Tickets are on Luma, and if you’ve been part of this from the start, you’ll hear from us first.

Come for the music. Come for whatever food situation we land on. Come because it’s the first time we’ve all been in a room together after a year of this being mostly a thing you read or listen to. Just don’t come to work the room.

If all we’ve created is another networking event, we’ve failed.

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When I came across a recent Positive News article about community football helping young people stay out of trouble, I nearly skimmed past it as another feel-good story about football saving the world. Then I read it properly, and realised it wasn’t really about football at all. It was about belonging.

I saw a version of this myself last year. My Boycott Your Bed sleep-out was meant to happen at Hampden Park in Glasgow, but the storms put paid to that. Reading FC Community Trust had no involvement in the campaign at all, but when I got in touch, they kindly let me sleep out on their grounds instead. It wasn’t the discomfort of a night outdoors I remember most. It was a reminder of what clubs like Reading do for the people around them, week in, week out, long after anyone’s watching.

We’ve become very good at talking about the cost of youth crime, antisocial behaviour and poor mental health. We debate policing numbers, sentencing, school exclusions and social media. Important conversations, all of them. But perhaps we spend far less time talking about what young people are actually saying yes to. Very few teenagers wake up wanting to get into trouble. Many simply don’t have anywhere better to be.

A floodlit football pitch on a Wednesday evening sounds almost laughably ordinary, until you realise what it represents. Someone expected you to turn up. Someone notices if you don’t. Someone knows your name, and you matter to a group. That isn’t just football. That’s community.

The sport itself almost becomes incidental. You could replace it with boxing, music, theatre, basketball, dance, gardening or coding. The activity matters, but the relationships matter more.

We often underestimate the extraordinary value of ordinary adults: coaches, volunteers, youth workers, the people who quietly give up two evenings a week because they believe young people deserve somewhere safe to grow. They’ll never make the front pages, and they’ll probably never receive an honour, yet they are preventing problems that society later spends millions trying to fix.

It’s an odd economic model. We’ll happily fund the consequences. We struggle to fund the prevention, perhaps because prevention is wonderfully invisible. You can’t easily measure the fight that never happened, the arrest that never took place, the addiction that never developed, the life that quietly took a different path. None of these make headlines.

Sir Anthony Seldon has spent years arguing that wellbeing needs to be treated as seriously as attainment, not as an add-on but as the foundation everything else is built on. It’s a case he made about education and society more broadly when he joined me on TTH last month, but it holds just as well on a Wednesday evening five-a-side pitch. Community football makes that argument without needing a single slide or statistic. It just turns up, every week, and lets young people belong to something.

What I found myself thinking about afterwards was how community football increasingly looks like everything many people say they miss about professional football. It’s local, inclusive, affordable, multicultural, less interested in winning at all costs and more interested in making sure everyone has somewhere to play. The real victory isn’t lifting a trophy. It’s turning up again next week.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about purpose, community and what holds us together. Whether it’s social enterprises, local food projects, music festivals, environmental groups or grassroots sport, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: people don’t flourish because someone tells them to make better choices. They flourish because they find somewhere they belong. Football just happens to be one of the oldest and simplest ways we’ve ever invented of making that happen.

It’s why I’m looking forward to speaking with Heather Manson from Street Soccer Scotland soon. A charity built by someone who lived through homelessness himself, using the same idea on a bigger scale: give people somewhere to belong, and everything else starts to follow.

Perhaps the question was never how do we stop young people getting into trouble. Perhaps it was always how do we create more places where they feel they belong.

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We’re now over 60% full for Third Half Live on Tuesday 25 August in London.

Just a heads up that we’ll be opening things up to the wider public at the end of this week, so if you’re a subscriber or follower and fancy joining us, best to register now rather than risk missing out.

Quick reminder of what this actually is: an informal evening, nothing more than drinks, food and good conversation with people who’ve been part of this journey. No agenda, no stage, no lanyards. Just a chance to put faces to names and see where the conversation goes.

Details and registration here:

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

Hope to see you there.

Scott

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You’re invited!

One of the unexpected joys of starting The Third Half has been discovering that it’s never really been about the podcast.

It’s about the conversations those episodes have created. The emails. The introductions. The comments. The moments when someone says, “I listened to that on the train,” or “That episode made me think differently.”

In other words, it’s become a bit of a community. Something like over 19,000 views and listens, and over 450 subscribers and followers across the platforms, which still amazes me given we’ve never once tried to compete with dancing pandas for attention. Just proper conversations about things that actually matter, with enough irreverence to stop them getting too pleased with themselves, and people kept sharing them with each other.

So it feels only right that, as we approach our first anniversary, we get some of that community into the same room.

On Tuesday 25 August, we’re holding the first Third Half Live in London.

Not a conference.

Not a networking event.

Just an evening for good people, good conversation, food and drink, and a chance to spend time together.

We’ll be gathering at The Flēot, a Community Coworking Green Skills Hub just off Fleet Street. Like many of the stories we’ve featured over the past year, it’s a place with purpose, a building that’s been given a new lease of life as a space for learning, collaboration and community.

I’ll share a few thoughts on the journey so far and where I think The Third Half might be heading. Beyond that, we’ll just let the conversation take over. If you’ve followed us for a while, you’ll know that’s usually when things get interesting.

We’re keeping numbers deliberately small so before we open invitations more widely, I wanted subscribers and followers to have the first opportunity to join us.

I’d genuinely love to see you there.

You can find all the details and reserve your place here:

https://luma.com/hdyshk64

Whether you’ve listened to one episode or twenty-five, thank you for being part of this.

I hope we can raise a glass together in August.

Scott

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Most people know Ian through The Icicle Works and that brilliant 80’s track, Love Is A Wonderful Colour. But behind the nostalgia is a songwriter still driven by the next lyric, the next melody, the next album.

In this short clip, Ian talks honestly about the reality of making music today: thousands of followers, but only around 10-15% of them buy a new record. It’s a challenge facing countless independent artists.

Then he gets to the heart of why he keeps going. “Unless I’m trying to find the right lyric... the right melody... I don’t feel alive.”

Creativity isn’t about looking backwards. It’s about the joy, and the frustration, of making something new.

The full conversation, where we dive into his brilliant new album 65, lands soon on The Third Half. Worth your time whether you’re a music fan or just someone who’s ever felt compelled to create.

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Anthony kept coming back to three simple ideas. Education as preparation for life rather than a set of exam results. Community as something we build together rather than a political slogan. And purpose as meaning beyond ourselves rather than success or status.

It was thoughtful, optimistic and at times surprisingly personal.

One more thing worth mentioning: Anthony’s new book, The Brexit Effect, is out now. Given how much of our conversation touched on where Britain finds itself today, it’s a natural companion piece to this episode. You can find it here: https://amzn.eu/d/04spsxRB

Watch his full conversation here

#TheThirdHalf #Leadership #Education #Purpose #Brexit

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It’s easy to get caught up in views, downloads and subscribers. The numbers matter, of course, but only because each one represents a real person who has chosen to spend some of their time with us.

June was our strongest month yet, and not by a whisker. Podcast downloads were up nearly half on May, our best month on record. More new readers joined the Substack than in any month since last autumn. Over 8,000 watches of our clips on TikTok. Every single channel moved in the right direction, and early July suggests the momentum is carrying. That’s encouraging. We’re not chasing algorithms, but it does suggest the ideas, guests and discussions are finding their audience.

So, a genuine thank you.

Thank you to everyone who reads, watches, listens, comments, shares and occasionally challenges us. The Third Half exists because of this growing community, and we’re grateful to have you with us.

A special thank you also to Happy, whose quiet work behind the scenes keeps everything moving. From editing and publishing to helping us understand what’s working and what isn’t, she’s such an important part of the team and a lovely person - her own story last month ‘I Spent a Year Building a Summit. Here's What It Taught Me About Nigeria's Green Future’ is golden.

And one small ask. We’re getting brilliant guests, people with real stories and hard-won wisdom, and they deserve an audience to match. If an episode or an essay has stayed with you, share it with someone who’d get something from it. That’s how this grows, one recommendation at a time.

We’re still a small platform, but we’re building something we’re proud of: thoughtful conversations about People, Planet and Progress, with fascinating guests and an audience that genuinely cares.

And one final thing. September marks our first anniversary, and we’re planning to celebrate it properly, in person, with some of the people who’ve made this first year what it was. We’ll say no more than that for now, but if you’re a subscriber, you’ll be among the first to hear.

Onwards.

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We have been having some brilliant conversations on The Third Half recently.

Brian Protheroe is in his 80s. He has released four albums in the last four years. He calls himself lazy. I genuinely do not think he knows what lazy means. And he is one of the most quietly remarkable people I have had on the show.

1. The Song That Refused To Age

Pinball was written in 1974 in a bedsit in Central London. No money. No work. Recently heartbroken. A pinball machine in the pub around the corner.

He calls it a diary entry. Every line actually happened. Except possibly the bit about the cat eating bread.

Fifty years later Paul Weller put it on his covers album. Morrissey has been a fan for decades. Noel Gallagher too. Not a bad fanbase for a song written on a bad week in a small room.

Brian heard the Weller version and was not immediately sure. He went for a walk. Listened again. It grew on him. Very Brian.

The song has outlasted almost everything around it and it is still finding new listeners every day.

2. He Wrote Mad Dog Because Screaming At The Telly Was Not Working Anymore

Brian does not think artists have a duty to challenge power.

But sometimes you just cannot help yourself.

He tried to write a Trump song during the first term. Left it unfinished. Was not happy with it. Then the second term came and the feelings came back louder and the song just came out.

Mad Dog. Something digging up the White House lawn. His guitarist Julian helped him make it as aggressive as it needed to be.

He did not write it to say something important. He wrote it because he had nowhere else to put it. Sometimes that is all a song needs to be.

3. Belonging Is Not A Place. It Is The Feeling Of Being Exactly Who You Are.

Brian has had three or four moments on stage where everything went quiet and he thought this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

Playing Hamlet. Finishing a song he loves. Sitting at the piano every morning with Mozart and Chopin.

He wrote a whole song about it for Still Walking. And when he explained what belonging means to him it was one of the most straightforward and honest things anyone has said on this show.

Belonging is where you are. Who you are. Its the centre of what is inside you.

Not bad for a man who also played Macbeth twice and once met Paul Simon at a folk club in London.

The full conversation is warm, funny, a little melancholy in the best way, and completely unhurried. Worth an hour of your time.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/on-the-turntable-brian-protheroe

People. Planet. Progress.

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A birthday present from Flora saw us spending 90 hot, humid minutes at the London School of Samba on Sunday with drums strapped round our necks.

There were ten of us on drums and percussion. Around fifty amateur dancers of every age, shape, size and ability were relying on us to keep the beat.

No pressure then.

I can sing, and I have a reasonable sense of rhythm. I just can’t drum. Thankfully, neither could Flora. Even more thankfully, the other eight were both louder and considerably better than us.

It was bloody hard work. The venue was gloriously scruffy, everyone was laughing, mistakes were celebrated rather than hidden, and somehow, despite ourselves, the dancers kept dancing.

Community doesn’t need perfect conditions. Sometimes all it takes is a hot room, a mixed bunch of people, a willingness to have a go, and enough good drummers to carry the rest of us.

I left exhausted, grinning, and with a whole new respect for anyone who can keep a samba beat.

People. Planet. (Not much) Progress.

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There’s an article doing the rounds in the accounting trade press this week, off the back of HLB International’s ESG Forum at the ICAEW in July. The thrust of it is that ESG has stopped being a regulatory tickbox and become a strategic lever, and that as the conversation moves from “how do we comply” to “how does an ESG strategy contribute to long-term growth,” the services accountants and advisers provide have to evolve with it.

Fair enough. But read between the lines and the real story isn’t really about accountants discovering ESG. It’s about accountants discovering their clients got there first.

Look at the procurement number buried in the piece. Two thirds of procurement professionals now say ESG is an important part of their company strategy, and more than half already have a sustainable and ethical procurement policy in place. Read that again. This isn’t a niche pocket of sustainability specialists. This is procurement, the most pragmatic, margin-obsessed function in any business, telling you governance and sustainability criteria are now baked into who they buy from. That’s not virtue signalling. That’s two thirds of an entire profession changing the rules of who gets a contract.

Which means everybody should be getting this by now. Not “should be thinking about it eventually.” Should be getting it, today, because the people who write the purchase orders already have.

And you can see it playing out commercially, not just in policy documents. Take a company like Origina, which builds its whole business on third-party support for enterprise software rather than forcing clients onto an endless upgrade treadmill. Sweat the asset you’ve already paid for instead of replacing it before its time. Less hardware churn, less waste, better governance over what you’re actually running and why, and capital that isn’t being burned on forced upgrades gets freed up to invest in people instead of vendors. I constantly raise this with partners and clients as an absolutely key value lever, not a side benefit. That’s why I love supporting Tomás and the leadership team at Origina, because they’re helping clients meet real ESG goals through the asset decisions they were already making, not bolting sustainability on as an afterthought.

So the gap isn’t conviction. The same piece quotes a UN study finding eighty per cent of SMEs recognise sustainability as a real issue, and only eight per cent are actually reporting on it. That’s not a belief problem. Everybody already believes it.

It’s a translation problem. The procurement department gets it. The commercially switched-on operators like Origina get it and are building entire propositions around it. The client, increasingly, gets it. The bit that’s catching up is the advisory layer in between, still offering compliance frameworks to clients who’ve already moved on to asking what their ESG position does for growth, capital access, and talent.

There’s a familiar shape to that, if you’ve listened to me at all on The Third Half. The professionals at the cutting edge of an industry rarely get caught out by not knowing. They get caught out by knowing and still selling the old service because that’s the one they’ve always sold. Same instinct that keeps a person doing the job that made them successful for a decade after it stopped fitting who they are.

The forum in July is accountants trying to close that gap before the market closes it for them. Worth watching whether they manage it before procurement and the Originas of this world finish writing the new rules without them.

#Tomas #Origina

People. Planet. Progress.

Source: The ESG Pivot: From Regulatory Pressure to Strategic Advantage, International Accounting Bulletin, 26 June 2026.

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We have been having some brilliant conversations on The Third Half recently.

This one with Tanishq Jain, founder of Dash, is one of the most honest conversations I have had with an early stage founder. No bravado. No pitch mode. Just someone building something real and telling you exactly what that feels like from the inside.

Tanishq is young, sharp and genuinely passionate about sustainability in a way that goes back generations in his family. This conversation has stayed with me.

1. The best business ideas come from spotting what everyone else is ignoring

Tanishq did not set out to start a business.

He was at the London Stock Exchange trying to help rate sustainability funds when he noticed something that stopped him cold. They were trying to rate funds on their sustainability credentials without actually knowing the sustainability characteristics of the companies inside them.

Top down. Full of assumptions. Layers of unverified information.

He called it an error 404 in his mind.

That moment of frustration became the foundation of Dash. Not a grand plan. Not a lightbulb moment over a flat white. Just someone spotting something obviously broken and deciding he could not leave it alone.

The best ideas usually start exactly like that.

2. Every founder hits a wall. The ones who make it learn to sit with it.

Q1 2025 was hard.

Tanishq is honest about it in a way that most founders are not. When the US administration changed and the macro environment shifted, he found himself asking questions he had not expected to be asking. Am I in the right industry. Is this industry ready. Is my business ready to be part of it.

He describes it as an existential moment. Not a crisis. A moment.

The shift he made was subtle but important. Instead of making decisions out of those moments, he learned to use them as brainstorming sessions. A conversation with himself rather than a verdict on the business.

That is not a small thing. That is the difference between founders who keep going and founders who do not.

3. Market timing is everything. Until you actually live it.

People told him this for years. He nodded along. He did not really get it.

Then he got it.

Market timing is not just about capturing customers at the right moment. It is about whether your investors still have runway to give you. Whether the market is open enough for people to try something new. Whether the world is in a mood to change or a mood to survive.

He came from a family business where you put in capital and got sales from day one. Tech is completely different. And the gap between what he expected and what he found taught him more about building a business than any accelerator programme ever did.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into recycling ships, the circular economy, AI and sustainability, and what Dash is really trying to build.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-22-tanishq

People. Planet. Progress.

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I don’t usually write about my day job on here. But something happened last week that I can’t stop thinking about, and I think it matters beyond Abuja, beyond Nigeria, maybe even beyond Africa.

On June 17 and 18, 2026, the Nigeria Environmental Summit (NESt) took place at the Abuja Continental Hotel. The theme was Unlocking Nigeria’s Green Economy. About a year of my life went into making it happen.

I want to tell you what that year looked like, what the summit was really about, and why I think it connects to conversations a lot of you are already having.

The year before the room fills up

Most people see a summit and think: speeches, panels, badges. They don’t see the spreadsheets.

Over the past year I’ve been serving as Secretary and Digital Communications Officer at the Nigerian Environmental Summit Group (NESUG), the public-private consortium that runs NESt annually. That title sounds clean. The reality was thousands of registrant records to deduplicate, DNS configurations for our mailing domain, QR-coded access passes, meal tickets, name tags, coordinating with UN agencies, chasing partnership letters to organisations like Lafarge Africa and GIZ, and nomination campaigns for the Nigeria Environmental Hall of Fame.

There were also things I genuinely hadn’t done before. I built AI-powered web apps (a Green Economy Oracle and a Green Future Pledge Generator) deployed on Vercel, running on the Anthropic API, for a live five-minute demonstration slot at the summit itself. A year ago I wouldn’t have known how to do that. Now I do.

That’s the part that sits with me. Not just what we built for the event, but what the event built in me.

What “green economy” actually means in Nigeria

I want to be honest about something. “Green economy” can sound like a phrase invented in a boardroom somewhere in Geneva to make wealthy countries feel better about their emissions. In Nigeria, it means something different and something more urgent.

Nigeria is the most populous country on the continent, a major oil producer, and simultaneously one of the countries most exposed to the effects of climate change: flooding in the south, desertification creeping down from the north, energy poverty affecting hundreds of millions of people. The tension at the heart of NESt is real: how do you build an economy that lifts people out of poverty without repeating the extractive mistakes of the last century?

The conversations at NESt 2026 weren’t abstract. We had policymakers, private sector players, NGOs, development finance institutions all in the same room. The question being asked, not just on panels but in corridors and over lunch, was: where is the actual investment going, and who does it reach?

That question doesn’t have a clean answer yet. But the fact that it’s being asked seriously, publicly, with receipts, by Nigerians in Nigeria, is itself significant.

What actually happened in that room

NESt 2026 ran across two full days. The programme covered green financing, renewable energy policy, sustainable agriculture, and waste management, with sessions designed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.

NESUG itself is worth understanding. It’s not a government agency and it’s not a typical NGO. It sits deliberately in the space between public institutions and private sector interests, trying to hold both accountable to the same long-term agenda. That structure gives it unusual credibility and unusual pressure. When a development finance institution and a federal ministry official are both in the room, you can’t afford to be vague.

What struck me most wasn’t any single speech. It was the density of the network in that hotel. People who had only emailed each other for months shaking hands. Implementing partners comparing notes. Young environmental professionals watching how the senior figures navigated disagreement. That’s what a summit actually produces not a communiqué, but a living document made of relationships.

A year on, and what comes next

I reflected publicly after NESt 2026 wrapped up, there’s something bigger underneath it.

Nigeria’s green economy transition is real, it’s underway, and it’s being shaped right now by the people willing to show up and do the unglamorous work the spreadsheets, the DNS records, the partnership letters that never get replied to, and the ones that do. NESUG is one of the institutions trying to make that work count for something. NESt is where it surfaces once a year.

I’m proud I was part of it. And I’ll be back next year with considerably less imposter syndrome.

Ishaku Happy is an editor in cheif for The Third Half

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Not bad advice for musicians.

Not bad advice for the rest of us either.

While editing my recent conversation with Bruce Soord, I found myself coming back to three moments that had very little to do with music and everything to do with life.

The first was about persistence.

Bruce has spent more than 25 years building an audience. No overnight breakthrough. No talent show. No viral moment. Just showing up, writing songs and continuing to do the work.

The second was about creativity.

The best songs, according to Bruce, aren’t manufactured. They appear. They emerge from experience, observation and moments when you’re not trying to force them into existence.

And the third was about success.

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation was Bruce’s admission that things only really started happening when he stopped chasing them.

No obsession with fame.

No obsession with validation.

No obsession with “making it”.

Just the work.

There is something refreshingly unfashionable about that idea in a world that constantly tells us to optimise, scale, hustle and grow.

Whether you’re building a business, writing a book, making music or simply trying to navigate life, the lesson feels remarkably similar:

Keep going.

Do good work.

Let success be a consequence, not the objective.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into 25 years of persistence, what makes a great song, and why Bruce walked away from chasing success, and what happened when he did.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/he-quit-chasing-fame-700000-fans

Scott

The Third Half

People. Planet. Progress.

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I went into this conversation thinking we were going to talk about kimchi.

We did. But we also talked about a lot more than that.

Rebecca Ghim is the founder of The Ferm, a fermented food business built around a simple but quietly radical idea. The vegetables that get thrown away before they ever reach a plate are not waste. They are ingredients waiting for someone to care enough to use them.

Something that didn’t surprise me but did hate hearing.

A single supplier generates around 300 kilogrammes of vegetable waste in a single night. Not rotten food. Not spoiled food. Fresh cauliflower leaves and broccoli stalks that are perfectly good and going nowhere.

Rebecca collects them. Ferments them. Turns them into something people actually want to eat.

It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. And that is kind of the point.

We spent an hour talking about food, but really we were talking about identity, culture, what we inherit from our grandmothers, and what happens when you build a business around values you are not willing to trade away even when the spreadsheet says you probably should.

It is one of those conversations that stays with you.

Full episode coming soon on The Third Half.

People. Planet. Progress.

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We have been having some fascinating conversations on The Third Half recently.

This one with Gillian Docherty on A Weed Dram, Chief Commercial Officer at the University of Strathclyde and former CEO of the Data Lab, is one that will stay with you.

Gillian has spent her career sitting right at the point where ideas either become real or quietly die. Academia, government, startups, scale ups, big enterprise. She has seen all of it from the inside. And she is honest about what is working and what is not.

1. Scotland is brilliant at starting things. Still learning how to finish them.

Scotland produces world class research. Disproportionate amounts of it for a country its size. The spin outs are strong. The early stage startups are getting real support. The talent is undeniably there.

So why does it keep failing to scale?

Gillian is clear about it. The problem is not at the front end. Scotland punches well above its weight there. The problem is what happens after that early promise. The journey from a great company to a truly scaled business is where things quietly fall apart.

It is not a new problem either. She points out that Scotland has a long history of invention. World changing invention. And a just as long history of watching other nations capitalise on it.

The gap between a great start and a great finish is still the defining challenge.

2. Universities and businesses have always spoken two different languages. Most partnerships never fix that.

Everyone talks about academia and industry working together. Most of the time it does not really work.

Gillian has spent years on both sides of that conversation. Her view is simple and direct.

The problem is not a lack of willingness. It is a lack of honesty about what each side actually needs. Universities are built around publishing, research outputs and long timescales. Businesses need speed, commercial outcomes and things that actually work in the market.

Those two worlds face in completely different directions. And most partnerships paper over that rather than deal with it.

The ones that do work start in a different place entirely. Not with a vague MOU or a networking relationship. With a real problem that someone somewhere is genuinely accountable for solving.

“The strongest relationships start with an industrial or societal problem. Not an abstract partnership.”

That is where the magic happens. And it is still not happening often enough.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into Scotland’s innovation ecosystem, the realities of scaling a business, and what AI is actually delivering versus what it is promising.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-gillian-docherty

People. Planet. Progress.

We have been having some brilliant conversations on The Third Half recently.

This one with Michelle Prance, Chief Executive of NatWest’s digital banking business, is one that will make you think differently about where technology is actually going and what good leadership looks like when the pace never slows down.

Michelle has spent her career at the intersection of banking, technology and people. She is sharp, honest and refreshingly direct about what is working and what is not.

1. Why most people get experimentation wrong

Experimentation sounds simple. Try something small. See if it works. Adjust.

But Michelle makes an important distinction that most organisations miss.

The problem is not that people are afraid to experiment. It is that when they do experiment, they quietly design it to succeed. They construct the test around the outcome they already believe in. They remove the real risk of being wrong.

That is not experimentation. That is confirmation.

Real experimentation means making something small enough that failure is survivable. It means creating genuine safety for people to push back, disagree and say out loud that an idea is not working.

“Where is my dissident? Where is the person who will say that is a really silly idea?”

That question does not get asked enough. And the teams that do ask it are the ones that actually move forward.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into the realities of digital banking, responsible growth, and what sustainability actually looks like when it moves beyond lip service.

2. We are using AI completely wrong

Everyone is talking about AI. But are we actually using it well?

Michelle’s view is clear. Most organisations are treating AI like a cost-cutting tool. A smarter version of automation. A way to take headcount out of a process.

That is not what it is for.

The real opportunity is redesign. Not just making existing systems cheaper but rebuilding how those systems work entirely. Jobs, customer service, personalisation, everything.

She uses a simple analogy that lands perfectly:

“Like a restaurant that remembers your table and your wine. But on steroids.”

That is what AI could do for banking. For any industry. If we stop using it like a calculator.

Everyone is talking about AI. But are we actually using it well?

Michelle’s view is clear. Most organisations are treating AI like a cost-cutting tool. A smarter version of automation. A way to take headcount out of a process.

That is not what it is for.

The real opportunity is redesign. Not just making existing systems cheaper but rebuilding how those systems work entirely. Jobs, customer service, personalisation, everything.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-19-michelle-prance

People. Planet. Progress.

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